Search form

One of the highlights of my job as the “Pentaho Community Guy” is the yearly Community Gathering. This year, thanks to Webdetails, it was in beautiful Cascais, Portugal. For a full recap of the event check out the blog, Pentaho Community Gathering (live) , courtesy of Jan Aertsen at kJube. This is the third year that the community has gathered for a weekend of presentations, beer and fun. In 2009 it was in Barcelona Spain and before that, Mainz Germany. I have been working with the community for about six years both as a developer and as community manager. I’ve watched it go from a few familiar people answering questions in the forums to a daily flood of ideas (and other stuff) in the IRC. Where it really gets fun and interesting is when people who work together, help each other and joke around every day, get to meet in person. The flow of ideas accelerates greatly when in person and not constrained by a command line. So - why only get the community together just once a year? Community members in the London area had the same question and...

Q&A is a new series on the Business Intelligence from the Swamp Blog that interviews key members of the Pentaho team to learn more about their focus at Pentaho and outlook on the BI and DI industry. For our first post, we interviewed Mari Jansdotter, Director of Embedded Sales at Pentaho. Mari has been at Pentaho for almost two years and comes to us from SugarCRM. She is based in our San Francisco office and in her free time can can be found chasing around her two adorable kids. 1. How have you seen the OEM landscape change at Pentaho over the past year? It is a whole new playing field! We have seen really positive trends, the most notable being a high increase in inbound interest. Larger organizations, who earlier might only have considered traditional, proprietary vendors for their enterprise-wide projects, are coming to Pentaho to improve upon their already mature product offerings. Our open standards-based architecture allows them to easily integrate Pentaho into existing products. Similarly, start-up and mid-market companies are choosing to build new products on Pentaho's platform because our end-to-end functionality can scale with them as...

It is always good to get out and meet old friends and new, when the sales calendar permits. A great way to combine meeting the public and keeping up Pentaho’s increasing momentum in the EMEA region is attending events. This month has seen seven so far; the launch of our EMEA HQ in Sweden, the Ovum Business Intelligence summit in London, our sponsorship of the Hadoop User Group, also in London, as well as dates for the Pentaho Agile BI Tour , which is ongoing for another few months First and foremost was the launch of our EMEA HQ in a city which has seen its fair share of Open Source innovation – Stockholm. Held in the famous 100 year old Dramaten theatre and co-hosted by Pentaho partner Omicron, an invited audience of around 50 heard from Lars Nordwall, our Swedish-born Senior Vice-President of Sales (pictured left), as well as partners Conduct and BizIntel. A great success in terms of networking, we will follow up with another event towards the end of the year also at the Dramaten, so feel free to let me know if you can make it...

CNN.com recently worked with Money and PayScale.com to create a list of the 100 Best Jobs In America . This list measures and ranks jobs by their pay, work satisfaction and growth opportunity. We are excited to announce that our own Pentaho Chief Geek and CTO, James Dixon made #35 on the list! Check it out: If you are looking to join a company that provides an exciting work environment that fosters creativity, presents rewarding technical challenges, and encourages experimentation, check out our open positions worldwide in engineering, marketing, sales and services. Maybe you could make this list next year! Learn more about career opportunities with Pentaho here: www. pentaho .com/ careers /

Congrats to our new partner Cloudera for putting on a great event this week. Hadoop World 2010 was a huge success - with over 900 attendees. It was great to talk to companies using Hadoop and those looking to solve their big data problems. We were also excited to have such a great showing at our presentation at the very end of the day with standing room only! On Wednesday, following Hadoop World, the Pentaho Agile BI Tour arrived in NYC. Pentaho and its partner Project Leadership Associates presented a special half-day seminar focused on Agile BI and Big Data. We also hosted the first of three special OEM Power Lunches for companies interested in embedding Pentaho. For an insider’s look at our Week of Hadoop check out our slide show below. If you missed our four announcements Tuesday about the availability of Pentaho Data Integration and Pentaho BI Suite for Hadoop and our new partnerships you can read what the press and analyst have to say: Hadoop pitched for business intelligence ITWorld.com, Joab Jackson Pentaho Adds Hadoop Support CTO Edge, Mike Vizard Pentaho Brings Businss intellgience to Hadoop ECRMGuide,...

Earlier this week, at Hadoop World in New York, Pentaho announced availability of our first Hadoop release. As part of the initial research into the Hadoop arena I talked to many companies that use Hadoop. Several common attributes and themes emerged from these meetings: 80-90% of companies are dealing with structured or semi-structured data (not unstructured). The source of the data is typically a single application or system. The data is typically sub-transactional or non-transactional. There are some known questions to ask of the data. There are many unknown questions that will arise in the future. There are multiple user communities that have questions of the data. The data is of a scale or daily volume such that it won’t fit technically and/or economically into an RDBMS. In the past the standard way to handle reporting and analysis of this data was to identify the most interesting attributes, and to aggregate these into a data mart. There are several problems with this approach: Only a subset of the attributes are examined, so only pre-determined questions can be answered. The data is aggregated so visibility into the lowest levels is lost...

It’s everywhere and expanding exponentially every day. But it might as well be a pile of %#$& unless you can turn all of that data into information. And do so in a timely, efficient and cost-effective manner. The old-school vendors don’t operate in a timely (everything is slow), efficient (everything is over-engineered, over-analyzed, over-staffed, etc) or cost-effective mode (the bloated supertanker needs feeding and the customer gets to pay for those inefficiencies), so that means new technologies and business models will drive innovation which ultimately serves the customers and communities. Back to Data, Data, Data - Enter open source technologies like Hadoop and Pentaho BI/DI to drive next gen big data analytics to the market. Hadoop and Pentaho have both been around about 5 years, are both driven by very active communities, and have both been experiencing explosive growth over the last 18 months. Our community members are the ones who came up with the original integration points for the two techs, not because it was a fun, science project thing to do but because they had real business pains they were trying to solve. This all started in 2009...

Quick Bit About Pentaho Pentaho has been all about building and delivering a scalable, complete end-to-end BI Suite from day one. From making the software "possible" during those humble beginnings to making it "available" and now "easy". You will find that Pentaho has an extensive offering that is both flexible and intuitive. Pentaho software has been targeted as the Commercial Open Source BI alternative by System Integrators, Consultancies, Enterprises, OEMs and SMBs. It has been deployed worldwide in a variety of industries; supporting mission critical applications which encompass both data integration and information delivery, all provided by "one" vendor, Pentaho. The Pentaho Pre-Sales Sandbox The Pre-Sales Sandbox is a resource that will streamline the effectiveness of the Evaluation/Selection process. With this resource at hand, you will be able to make an informed decision as quickly and efficiently as possible. Examples, tutorials, consolidated information are staged here to view and download to assist you in your evaluation process. Please be aware that the collateral available on this site can be posted on a moments notice and is intended to serve the masses as quickly as possible. Therefore the content downloaded may...

Big things are happening at Pentaho this month, with an emphasis on Big Data . We are headlining Hadoop events in New York, London and San Diego. If you are attending Hadoop World in New York City on October 12th, make sure to stop by our booth and attend Richard Daley's session, ' Putting Analytics in Big Data Analysis '. Then stay around until the 13th for a special FREE half-day seminar, ' Agile BI Meets Big Data ' with our partners, Project leadership Associates. All the while, we’re still on the road with the Agile BI Tour hitting full force in October. We’ll be visiting 10 more cities around the world with these info-packed seminar and training sessions. Directly following the Agile BI events in New York, San Mateo, and Houston, Pentaho will be hosting a special OEM Power Lunch , where we will explore Pentaho's architecture, hear some specific OEM use cases, and introduce you to the Pentaho OEM team. Hadoop Events Join us to see how we're simplifying the complexities of Big Data Analytics with Pentaho's Biggest initiative to date, Pentaho for Hadoop. October 6 – San...

A few years ago when talking with some potential investors I heard on more than one occasion “ Everybody already has BI ” or “ The market is saturated with BI products. ” Quite the contrary – even the few companies that have BI or Data Integration products are just scratching the surface of their potential usage. Many projects are only rolled out to a limited set of users, handcuffed by the outrageous price of most products on the market. And what about all of the other projects that never even started due to cost constraints? And what about the rest of the companies on the planet who could never even buy their first BI/DI products? And what about all of the applications that could desperately use some embedded BI/analytical capabilities but due to cost and technical constraints of the old guard BI companies could never get off these efforts of the ground. Imagine how frustrating it can be when the needs and requirements to make your business run more efficiently and effectively are held hostage by a few large software vendors. Thus, the founding of Pentaho and the democratization...